Building up
Xavier Tate is twenty-six, 6'2", medium-brown skin, and the kind of face that people remember — wide cheekbones, a ready grin, long soft hair that falls in loose curls and that he sometimes braids or ties back, stud earrings glinting when he smiles. He keeps his body lean and athletic; years of work and late-night walks have given him a fit physique and a slim waist. Ink trails across his right arm and a bold piece on his left thigh peek out from under sleeves and jeans — private stories that his tattoos keep. People call him handsome; his eyes keep you longer than you expect.
He grew up in a household that was steady at first. His parents, Marcus and Lissette Tate, met young, worked hard, and dreamed loud. Marcus ran a small construction subcontracting business; Lissette did office work and kept a warm, slightly chaotic home that smelled of coffee and cinnamon. For a while the money came in steady enough to pay the bills and to let the kids—Xavier and his little sister Kamaria—go to the school plays and get new sneakers. There were evenings when the family sat around the chipped kitchen table and argued about everything from politics to who’d washed the dishes. Those were ordinary, very human days, and Xavier remembers them with a particular ache.
Everything shifted the year Xavier turned seventeen. Marcus trusted the wrong person — his closest friend, someone Marcus had taken under his wing when they were both starting out. Lissette and Marcus had always been close to this man; he’d been in and out of the house, joking with the kids, fixing minor things on the truck. One late winter, the trust crumbled: Marcus’s friend and Lissette disappeared together with the family’s savings, closing bank accounts, leaving chains of forged signatures and invoices. The bills piled up; the subcontracting work dried up without funds or reputation. Marcus, who had been the rock of the family, broke in a way no one knew how to fix.
The humiliation and the financial ruin were sudden and brutal. Marcus’s grief was private, swallowed into silence that widened into weeks. One night, after a terse argument and a stretch of months of desperation, Marcus took his life. Xavier found the aftermath: the stunned neighbors, the church with its folding chairs, the little boy in the casket who’d been his father. At seventeen, Xavier became the adult in a house he couldn’t quite afford. He was raw with grief and furious with a world that had betrayed him.
Kamaria—ten at the time—became Xavier’s lodestar. She was beautiful in a way that made people smile: long black curls, a gentle face, and eyes that listened. Where Xavier learned to harden, Kamaria stayed soft. She was shy but fast to laugh; she loved books and drew careful pictures of the city skyline. Xavier vowed, in the half-formed language of grief and obligation, to keep her safe.
College slipped away. Tuition looked like a private joke when there wasn’t even enough for rent. Xavier took three jobs, one after the other, strung through dawn, afternoon, and night: barista at a bodega café (early mornings), a security shift at a downtown garage (afternoons), and late-night deliveries for an app service to make ends meet. He learned to split his life into neat, repetitive blocks; exhaustion became a second skin. He fixed the house’s broken windows himself, learned the mail schedule, and learned which neighbors would lend flour and which would not. The Bronx became less of a place and more of a set of routines: the corner store where the cashier saved his shift coffee, the stoop where Kamaria practiced scales on a battered keyboard, the landlord who considered missed rent with a mechanical indifference.
Romantic life, when it existed, collided with his responsibilities. He dated three women over the years—Charlotte Ramirez, Sophia Bryant, and Hannah Bianchi—and each relationship started as breathless hope and ended bruised and ashamed for the same reason: money. Xavier gave what he had—attention, tenderness, loyalty—but he couldn’t promise dates, vacations, or expensive gifts. “He’s too broke,” they said, not unkindly at first, but their words hardened into a reason to leave. Each breakup left a hollow in his chest Xavier tried to cover with the next shift and a joke for Kamaria.
Then the past circled back in a way he hadn’t expected. On the same day, each of those women appeared at his door carrying a child and a paternity test. Charlotte came with Zaiden, six years old, wide eyes and the exact same smile as Xavier; Sophia arrived with Milo, four, who chased pigeons with the same light step; Hannah brought tiny Nayela, two, who clung to her mother but reached for Xavier like a magnet. The tests — clinical, legal, cold — all said what his bones already suspected: they were his. Each child looked like a mirror turned toward his own features: his lips, the tilt of his chin, the curl of his eyelashes.